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The Question of Protestantism

Christianity is divided into three great denominations: Catholicism,

Orthodoxy, and Protestantism, not to mention the Copts and other
ancient groups close to Orthodoxy. This classification may surprise
some of our regular readers since it seems to place Protestantism on
the same level as the ancient Churches; what we have in mind here,
however, is not liberal Protestantism or just any sect but Lutheranism,
which incontestably manifests a Christian possibility—a limited one,
no doubt, and excessive through certain of its features, but not intrin-
sically illegitimate and therefore representative of certain theological,
moral, and even mystical values. If Evangelicalism—to use the term
favored by Luther—were located in a world such as that of Hinduism,
it would appear as a possible way and would no doubt be considered a
secondary darshana among others; in Buddhism it would be no more
heterodox than Amidism or the school of Nichiren, both of which,
however, are quite independent with regard to the main tradition sur-
rounding them.
To grasp our point of view, it is necessary to understand that
religions are determined by archetypes, which are so many spiritual
possibilities: on the one hand every religion a priori manifests an arche-
type, but on the other hand any archetype can manifest itself a poste-
riori within every religion. Thus Shiism, for example, is obviously not
the result of a Christian influence but is instead a manifestation within
Islam of the religious possibility—or the spiritual archetype—that
affirmed itself in a direct and plenary fashion in Christianity; and this
same possibility gave rise to Amidist mysticism within Buddhism,
though in a way that accentuates another dimension of the archetype,
namely, as a cosmic prodigy of Mercy—a prodigy requiring and at
the same time conferring the quasi-charism of saving Faith; in the
case of Shiism, on the other hand, the accent is upon the Superman,
who opens Heaven to earth. It could be said in a similar way that the
Germanic soul—treated by Rome in too Latin a manner, though this
is another question—which is neither Greek nor Roman, felt the need
of a simpler and more inward religious archetype, one less formalistic
and therefore more “popular” in the best sense of the word; this in
certain respects is the archetype of Islam, a religion based on a Book
and conferring priesthood upon every believer. At the same time and

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

from another point of view, the Germanic soul had a nostalgia for a
perspective that integrates the natural into the supernatural, that is,
a perspective tending toward God without being against nature, a
piety that is not monastic but accessible to every man of good will in
the midst of earthly preoccupations, a way founded upon Grace and
trust, not upon Justice and works; and this way incontestably has its
premises in the Gospel itself.

_6_

Here it is once again appropriate—for we have done so on other

occasions—to clarify the difference between a heresy that is extrinsic,
hence relative to a given orthodoxy, and another that is intrinsic,
hence false in itself as well as with regard to all orthodoxy or to truth
as such. To simplify the matter we could limit ourselves to pointing
out that the first kind of heresy manifests a spiritual archetype—in
a limited manner, no doubt, but nonetheless efficaciously—whereas
the second is merely a human contrivance and therefore based solely
on man’s own productions;1 and this settles the entire issue. To claim
that a “pious” spiritualist is assured of salvation is meaningless, for
in total heresies there is no element that can guarantee posthumous
beatitude, even though—apart from all question of belief—a man can
always be saved for reasons that elude us; but he is certainly not saved
by his heresy.
On the subject of Arianism, which was an especially pervasive
heresy, the following remark ought to be made: Arianism is unques-
tionably heterodox in that it takes Jesus to be a mere creature; this
idea can have a meaning in the perspective of Islam, but it is incom-
patible with Christianity. Nonetheless, the lightning-like expansion
of Arianism shows that it satisfied a spiritual need—a need corre-
sponding to the archetype of which Islam is the most characteristic
manifestation—and it is precisely to this need or expectation that
Protestantism finally responded,2 not by humanizing Christ, of course,

1
Such as Mormonism, Bahaism, the Ahmadism of Kadyan, and all the “new religions”
and other pseudo-spiritualities that proliferate in the world today.
2
Arius of Alexandria was not a German, but his doctrine fulfilled a certain desire of

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 The Question of Protestantism

but in simplifying the religion and Germanizing it in a certain fashion.

Another well-known heresy was Nestorianism, which rigorously sepa-
rated the two natures of Christ, the divine and the human, and in this
way saw in Mary the mother of Christ but not of God; this perspec-
tive corresponds to a possible theological point of view, and it is thus
a question of an extrinsic, not a total, heresy.
Strictly speaking, all religious exoterism is an extrinsic heresy,
clearly so in relation to other religions, but above all in relation to the
sophia perennis; it is precisely this perennial wisdom that constitutes
an esoterism when combined with a religious symbolism. An extrinsic
heresy is a partial or relative truth—in its formal articulation—that
presents itself as complete or absolute, whether it is a question of
religions or, within these, of denominations; but the starting point is
always a truth, hence also a spiritual archetype. An intrinsic heresy
is entirely different: its starting point is either an objective error
or a subjective illusion; in the first case the heresy lies more in the
doctrine, and in the second it is a priori in the pretension of a false
prophet; but it goes without saying that both can be combined and
indeed are necessarily so in the second case. Even though no error is
possible without a particle of truth, intrinsic heresy can have neither
doctrinal nor methodic value, and it is impossible to justify it in rela-
tion to some extenuating circumstance, precisely because it projects
no celestial model.

_6_

It is not difficult to argue—against the Reformation—that the tra-

ditional authorities and Councils, by definition inspired by the Holy
Spirit, could not have been mistaken; this is true, but it does not
exclude paradoxes that mitigate an otherwise virtually self-evident
claim. First of all—and this is what gave wings to the Reformers,
starting with Wycliffe and Huss—Christ himself repudiated many
“traditional” elements supported by the “authorities” in calling them
“commandments of men”; furthermore, the excesses of “papism” at

the German mentality, whence its success with Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Bur-
gundians, and Langobards.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

the time of Luther and well before prove at the very least that the
papacy contains certain excesses, which the Byzantine Church is the
first to note and stigmatize, if not that the papacy in itself is illegiti-
mate. What we mean is that the Pope, instead of being primus inter
pares as Saint Peter had been, has the exorbitant privilege of being at
once prophet and emperor: as prophet he places himself above the
Councils, and as emperor he possesses a temporal power surpassing
that of all the princes, including the emperor himself; and it is pre-
cisely these unheard-of prerogatives that permitted the entry of mod-
ernism into the Church in our time, in the fashion of a Trojan horse
and despite the warnings of preceding Popes; that Popes may person-
ally have been saints does not at all weaken the valid arguments of the
Eastern Church. In a word, if the Western Church had been such as
to avoid casting the Eastern Church into the “outer darkness”—and
with what a manifestation of barbarism!—it would not have had to
undergo the counterblow of the Reformation.
Be that as it may, to say that the Roman Church is intrinsically
orthodox and integrally traditional does not mean that it conveys all
the aspects of the world of the Gospel in a direct, compelling, and
exhaustive manner, even though it necessarily contains them and
manifests them occasionally or sporadically; for the world of the
Gospel was Oriental and Semitic and immersed in a climate of holy
poverty, whereas the world of Catholicism is European, Roman, and
imperial, which means that the religion was Romanized inasmuch as
the characteristic traits of the Roman mentality determined its formal
elaboration. Suffice it to mention in this regard its legalism and its
administrative and even military spirit; these traits can be seen, among
other places, in the disproportionate complication of rubrics, the
prolixity of the missal, the dispersing complexity of the sacramental
economy, and the pedantic manipulation of indulgences, as well as
in a certain administrative centralization, indeed militarization, of
monastic spirituality; nor is this to forget, on the level of forms—
which is far from negligible—the Titanic paganism of the Renaissance
and the nightmare of Baroque art. The following remark could also
be made, again from the point of view of formal outwardness: in the
Catholic world the difference between religious and secular dress is
often abrupt to the point of incompatibility, and this was already the
case even by the end of the Middle Ages; when the essentially worldly
and vain, even erotic, trappings of the princes are compared to the

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 The Question of Protestantism

majestic garments of the priests, it is difficult to believe that the first,

like the second, are Christians, whereas in Oriental civilizations the
style of dress is in general homogeneous. In Islam there is no dividing
line between religious personages and the rest of society; there is no
lay society opposed at the level of appearances to a priestly one. This
being said, let us close this parenthesis, the point of which was simply
to show that the Catholic world presents certain traits—on its surface
as well as in its depths—which certainly do not express the climate
of the Gospels.3
Too often people have argued that it is sacred institutions that
count and not the human accidents that disfigure them; this is obvious,
and yet the very degree of this disfiguration indicates that some of the
imperfection was due to a certain human zeal within the institutions
themselves; Dante and Savonarola saw this clearly in their own way,
and the very phenomenon of the Renaissance proves it. If we are told
that the papacy—such as it was throughout the centuries—repre-
sents the only possible solution for the West, we readily agree, but
the risks this unavoidable adaptation so unavoidably included should
therefore have been foreseen, and everything should have been done
to diminish, not increase, them; if a strongly marked hierarchy was
indispensable, the priestly aspect of every Christian should have been
insisted upon all the more.
Be that as it may, what permitted Luther to separate from Rome4
was his awareness of the principle of “orthodox decadence”, that is,

3
For someone like Joseph de Maistre, whose intelligence otherwise had great merits,
the Reformers could not be other than “nobodies”, who dared to set their personal
opinions against the traditional and unanimous certitudes of the Catholic Church; he
was far from suspecting that these “nobodies” spoke under the pressure of an arche-
typal perspective, which as such could not help but reveal itself in appropriate cir-
cumstances. The same author accused Protestantism of having done an immense evil
in breaking up Christianity, but he readily loses sight of the fact that Catholicism did
as much in rashly excommunicating all the Patriarchs of the East; and this is without
forgetting the Renaissance, whose evil was—to say the least—just as “immense” as
that of the political and other effects of the Reformation.
4
He separated from the Roman Church only after his condemnation, by burning the
bull of excommunication; one should not lose sight of the fact that at the time of the
Reformation there was no unanimity on the question of the Pope and the Councils,
and even the question of the divine origin of papal authority was not free from all
controversy.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

the possibility of decadence within the immutable framework of a

traditional orthodoxy, an awareness inspired by the example of the
scribes and Pharisees in the Gospel with their “commandments of
men”; objectively, these are the specifications, developments, elabora-
tions, clarifications, and stylizations that may be required by a given
temperament though not by another.5 Another association of ideas
that was useful to Luther and to Protestantism in general is the Augus-
tinian opposition between a civitas Dei and a civitas terrena or diaboli:
in witnessing the disorders of the Roman Church, he was easily led to
identify Rome with the “earthly city” of Saint Augustine. There is also
a fundamental tendency in the Gospel that responds with particular
force to the needs of the Germanic soul: namely, a tendency toward
simplicity and inwardness, hence away from theological and liturgical
complication, formalism, dispersion of worship, and the too often
comfortable tyranny of the clergy. On the other hand the Germans
were sensitive to the nobly and robustly popular appeal of the Bible;
this has no relationship with democracy, for Luther was a supporter of
a theocratic regime upheld by the emperor and the princes.
Without question, the perspective of Protestantism is typically
Pauline; it is founded on what might be called the Gnostic dualism of
the following elements: flesh and spirit, death and life, servitude and
freedom, Law and Grace, justice through works and justice through
faith, Adam and Christ. On the other hand Protestantism is founded,
like Christianity as such, on the Pauline idea that the universality
of salvation answers to the universality of sin or of the state of the
sinner; only the redemptive death of Christ could deliver man from
this curse; through the Redemption Christ became the luminous head
of all humanity. But the typically Pauline accentuation of this Message
is the doctrine of justification through faith, which Luther made the
pivot of the religion, or more precisely of his mysticism.

_6_

5
Hinduism—without mentioning the Mediterranean paganisms—furnishes another
example of this kind, with the heavy and endless pedantry of the Brahmans, which it
was not too difficult to escape, however, given the plasticity of the Hindu spirit and
the suppleness of its corresponding institutions.

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 The Question of Protestantism

After the failure of Wycliffe and Huss—the tendencies of whose doc-

trine, if not the doctrine itself, it would have been good to retain—the
Popes contributed to the Lutheran explosion by their impenitence;6
after the failure—within the very framework of Catholic ortho-
doxy—of Dante, Savonarola, and other admonishers, Luther caused
the Catholic renovation by his virulence; Providence willed both out-
comes, the Protestant Church as well as the Tridentine Church. After
the Council of Trent, the ideal situation would have been for Catholi-
cism to assimilate the essence of Protestantism without disavowing
itself, just as Protestantism should have rediscovered the essence of
the Catholic reality; instead both parties hardened in their respective
positions, and in fact it could not have been otherwise, if only for the
same reason that there are different religions; for it is necessary that
spiritual perspectives be entirely themselves before being modified,
all the more so in that their over-accentuation responds to racial or
ethnic needs.7
Each denomination expresses the Gospel in a certain manner; now
this expression seems to us to be the most direct, the most ample,
and the most realistic in the Orthodox Church, and this can already
be seen in its outward forms, whereas the Catholic Church offers an
image that is more Roman and less Oriental, and in a certain sense
even more worldly since the Renaissance and the Baroque epoch,
as we have pointed out above. Latin “civilizationism” has nothing
to do with the world and spirit of the Gospel; in the final analysis,
however, the Roman West is Christian, and therefore Christianity has
the right to be Roman. As for the Protestant Church, the question of
its forms of worship does not arise since in this respect it participates
in Catholic culture, though it introduces into this culture a principle

6
This is something Cardinal Newman and others have acknowledged from within the
Catholic camp.
7
In saying this we do not lose sight of the fact that the Germans of the South—the
Allamanis (the Germans of Baden, the Alsatians, the German Swiss, the Swabians) and
the Bavarians (including the Austrians)—have a rather different temperament from
that of the Germans of the North and that everywhere there are mixtures; racial and
ethnic frontiers in Europe are in any case somewhat fluctuating. We do not say every
German is made for Lutheran Protestantism, for Germanic tendencies can obviously
appear within Catholicism, just as conversely Protestant Calvinism expresses above all
a Latin possibility.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

of somewhat iconoclastic sobriety, while having the advantage of not

accepting the Renaissance and its prolongations; what this means is
that Protestantism retained the forms of the Middle Ages, artistically
speaking and according to the intention of Luther, while at the same
time simplifying them, and thus it escaped the unspeakable aberration
of Baroque art. From the spiritual point of view Protestantism retains
a spirit of simplicity and inwardness from the Gospel while accentu-
ating the mystery of faith, and it presents these aspects with a vigor
whose moral and mystical value cannot be denied; this accentuation
was necessary in the West, and since Rome would not take it upon
itself, it is Wittenberg that did so.
In connection with Protestant quasi-iconoclasm, we would point
out that Saint Bernard also wished that chapels be empty, bare, and
sober—in short, that “sensible consolations” be reduced to a min-
imum; but he wished this for monasteries and not cathedrals; in this
case the sense of the sacred was concentrated on the essential element
of the rites. We meet with this perspective in Zen as well as Islam,
and above all we meet with it repeatedly in Christ, so much so that
it would be unjust to deny any precedent in the Scriptures for the
Lutheran attitude; Christ wanted one to worship God “in spirit and
in truth” and to pray without using “vain repetitions, as the heathen
do”; it is an emphasis on faith, with sincerity and intensity being pre-
eminent.

_6_

The celibacy of priests, which was imposed by Gregory VII after a

thousand years of the contrary practice—the ancient practice being
maintained to this day in the Eastern Church—presents several serious
drawbacks. In the first place, it needlessly repeats the celibacy of monks
and separates priests more radically from lay society, which in this way
becomes all the more laic; in other words this measure reinforces a
feeling of dependence and lower moral value in the laity, marriage
being in practice belittled by yet another ukase. Furthermore, when
celibacy is imposed upon an enormous number of priests—for society
has all the more need of priests as it grows increasingly numerous, and
Christianity embraces all the West—it inevitably creates moral disor-
ders and contributes to a loosening of morals, whereas it would have

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 The Question of Protestantism

been better to have good married priests than bad celibate priests; the
only alternative is to reduce the number of priests, which is impos-
sible since society is large and needs them. Finally, the celibacy of the
clergy is an obstacle to the procreation of men of religious vocation
and thus impoverishes society; if only men without a religious voca-
tion have children, society will become more and more worldly and
“horizontal” and less and less spiritual and “vertical”.
Be that as it may, Luther in turn lacked realism: he was aston-
ished that during his absence from Wittenberg—this was the year of
Wartburg—the promoters of the Reformation gave themselves up to
all kinds of excesses; at the end of his life he even went so far as to
regret that the mediocre masses had not remained under the rod of the
Pope. Not much concerned with collective psychology, he believed
the simple principle of piety could replace the material supports that
contribute so powerfully to regulate the behavior of the crowds; it
not only keeps this behavior in equilibrium in space but stabilizes it
in time. In his mystical subjectivism he did not realize that a religion
needs symbolism in order to survive, that the inward cannot live
within a collective consciousness without outward signs;8 but as a
prophet of inwardness he scarcely had a choice.
The Latin West has too often lacked realism and moderation,
whereas the Greek Church, like the East in general, has better under-
stood how to reconcile the demands of spiritual idealism with those
of the everyday human world. Adopting a particular point of view,
we would like to make the following remark: it is very unlikely that
Christ, who washed the feet of his disciples and taught them that the
“first shall be last”, would have appreciated the imperial pomp of the
Vatican court: the kissing of the foot, the triple crown, the flabella,
the sedia gestatoria; on the other hand there is no reason to think he
would have disapproved of the ceremonies surrounding an Orthodox
Patriarch, these being of a priestly and not imperial style; he would
no doubt have disapproved of the cardinalate, which further raises
the princely throne of the Pope and constitutes a dignity that is not
sacerdotal and is more worldly than religious.9

8
This, let it be said in passing, is what is forgotten even by most of the impeccable
gurus of contemporary India, beginning with Ramakrishna.
9
“But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are breth-

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

We have spoken above of the celibacy of priests imposed by

Gregory VII, and we must add a word concerning the Evangelical
counsels and monastic vows. When one reads in the Gospel, “There
is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s,
but he shall receive an hundredfold,” one immediately thinks of
monks and nuns; now Luther thought it was solely a question of per-
secutions, in the sense of this saying from the Sermon on the Mount:
“Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for
theirs is the kingdom of Heaven”;10 and he is all the more sure of his
interpretation in that there were neither anchorites nor monks before
the fourth century.

_6_

Viewed in its totality, Protestantism has something ambiguous about

it: on the one hand it is inspired sincerely and concretely by the Bible,
but on the other hand it is bound up with humanism and the Renais-
sance. Luther incarnates the first aspect: his perspective is medieval
and so to speak retrospective, and it gives rise to a conservative and at
times esoterizing pietism. In Calvin, on the contrary, the tendencies
of humanism, hence of the Renaissance, mingle with the movement
rather strongly, if indeed they do not determine it; no doubt he is
greatly inspired in his doctrine by Luther and the Swiss Reformers,
but he is a republican in his own way—on a theocratic basis, of
course—and not a monarchist like the German Reformer; and it can
be said on the whole that in a certain manner he was more opposed
to Catholicism than Luther was.11

ren.” “Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master, even Christ” (Matthew
23:8, 10).
10
He says so in a marginal note of his translation: “Whosoever believes must suffer
persecution and risk all” (alles dran setzen). And he repeats it in his hymn Ein feste Burg
ist unser Gott: “Even if they [the persecutors] take body, goods, honor, child, and wife,
let them go (lass fahren dahin); they shall receive no benefit; the Kingdom [of God]
shall be ours” (das Reich muss uns doch bleiben).
11
As for Protestant liberalism, Luther eventually foresaw its abuses, and he would in
any case be horrified to see this liberalism as it appears in our time—he who could

32

 The Question of Protestantism

The fundamental ideas of the Reformation had already been “in

the air” for some time, but it is Luther who lived them and made
of them a personal drama. His Protestantism—like other particular
perspectives contained within a general perspective—is an over-accen-
tuated partitioning, but one that is nonetheless sufficient and effica-
cious, hence “nonillegitimate”.12
One cannot study the question of Protestantism without taking
into consideration the powerful personality of its real, or at least its
most notable, founder. First of all, and this follows from what we
have just said, there are no grounds for asserting that Luther was a
modernist ahead of his time, for he was in no way worldly and sought
to please no one; his innovations were assuredly of the most auda-
cious kind, to say the least, but they were Christian and nothing else;
they owed nothing to any philosophy or scientism.13 He did not reject
Rome because it was too spiritual, but on the contrary because it
seemed to him too worldly—too “after the flesh” and not “after the
Spirit”, from his particular point of view.
The mystic of Wittenberg14 was a German semiticized by Chris-
tianity, and he was representative in both respects: fundamentally
German, he loved what is sincere and inward, not clever and formal-
istic; Semitic in spirit, he admitted only Revelation and faith and did
not wish to hear of Aristotle or the Scholastics.15 On the one hand

bear neither self-sufficient mediocrity nor iconoclastic fanaticism.

12
Evangelical Protestantism, properly so called, which is at the antipodes from liberal
Protestantism, was perpetuated in pietism, whose father was de Labadie, a mystic
converted to the Reformation in the seventeenth century, and whose most notable
representatives were no doubt Spener and Tersteegen; this pietism, or piety, always
exists in various places in either a diminished or a quite honorable form.
13
As is the case on the contrary with Catholic modernism. The fact that this mod-
ernism is open not only to Protestantism but also to Islam and other religions gets us
nowhere since this same modernism is just as open to no matter what—to everything
except Tradition.
14
For he was a mystic rather than a theologian, which explains many things.
15
It might be objected that the Semites adopted the Greek philosophers, but this is
not the question, for the adoption was varied and unequal, not to mention undertaken
with numerous hesitations. And in any case Luther—a cultivated man—was also a lo-
gician and could not be otherwise; in certain respects he was Latinized of necessity—as
was an Albert the Great or an Eckhart—but this was only on the surface.

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there was something robust and powerful (gewaltig) in his nature, with
a complement of poetry and gentleness (Innigkeit); on the other hand
he was a voluntarist and an individualist, who expected nothing from
either intellectuality or metaphysics. No doubt his impetuous genius
was capable of being crude—to say the least—but he lacked neither
patience nor generosity; he could be vehement but no more so than a
Saint Jerome or other saints who reviled their adversaries, “devoured”
as they were by “zeal for the house of the Lord”; and no one can deny
that they found precedents for this in both Testaments.16
The message of Luther is expressed essentially in two legacies,
which attest to the personality of the author and to which it is impos-
sible to deny grandeur and efficaciousness: the German Bible and
the hymns. His translation of the Scriptures, while conditioned in
certain places by his doctrinal perspective, is a jewel of both language
and piety; as for the hymns—most of which are not from his hand,
although he composed their models and thus gave the impulse to all
this flowering—they became a fundamental element of worship, and
they were a powerful factor in the expansion of Protestantism.17 The
Catholic Church itself could not resist this magic; it ended by adopting
several Lutheran hymns that had become so popular they seemed as
essential as the air one breathes. In summary, the whole personality
of Luther is in his translation of the Psalms and in his famous hymn,
“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott), which
became the “war song” (Trutzlied) of Protestantism and whose quali-
ties of power and grandeur cannot be denied. But more gently, this
personality is also seen in his commentary on the Magnificat, which
attests to an inner devotion to the Holy Virgin, whom Luther never
rejected; having read this commentary without knowing its author,
Pope Leo X remarked, “Blessed be the hands that wrote this!” Clearly

16
When the Reformer calls the “papist mass” an “abomination”, we are made to
think of the bonze Nichiren, who claimed that it sufficed to invoke Amida only once
to fall into Hell, not to mention the Buddha, who rejected the Veda, the castes, and
the gods.
17
Among composers of hymns, there were notably the pastor Johann Valentin An-
drea, author of the “Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz”, and later Paul
Gerhardt, Tersteegen, and Novalis, whose hymns are among the jewels of German
poetry; and let us add that the religious music of Bach testifies to the same spirit of
powerful piety.

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 The Question of Protestantism

the German Reformer was not able to maintain public devotion to the
Virgin, but this was because of the general reaction against the disper-
sion of religious sentiment, hence in favor of worship concentrated on
Christ alone, which had to become absolute and therefore exclusive,
as is the worship of Allah for Muslims. And in any case Scripture treats
the Virgin with a somewhat surprising parsimony—a fact that played
a certain role here—though there are also the crucial, and doctrinally
inexhaustible, declarations that Mary is “full of grace” and that “all
generations shall call me blessed”.18
The German Reformer was a mystic in the sense that his way was
purely experimental and not conceptual; the pertinent demonstrations
of a Staupitz were of no help to him. To discover the efficacy of Mercy
he needed first the “event of the tower”: having meditated in vain on
the “Justice” of God, he had the grace of understanding in a flash that
this Justice is merciful and that it liberates us in and by faith.

_6_

The great themes of Luther are Scripture, Christ, the Inward, Faith;
the first two elements belong to the divine side and the second two
to the human side. By emphasizing Scripture—at the expense of
Tradition—Protestantism is close to Islam, where the Koran is every-
thing; by emphasizing Christ—at the expense of the Pope, hierarchy,
clergy—Protestantism recalls devotional Buddhism, which places
everything in the hands of Amitabha; the liturgical and ritual expres-
sion of this Christic primacy is Communion, which is as real and as
important for Luther as it is for Catholics. The Lutheran tendency
toward the “inward”, the “heart” if one will, is incontestably founded
on the perspective of Christ, as is the emphasis on faith, which more-
over evokes—we repeat—Amidist mysticism as well as Muslim piety.
We would not dream of making these seemingly needless comparisons
if they did not serve to illustrate the principle of the archetypes we
mentioned above, which is of crucial importance.

18
As Dante said: “Lady, thou art so great and possesseth such power that whosoever
desireth grace and has not recourse to thee, it is as if his desire wished to fly without
wings” (Paradiso, 33:13-15).

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

As for Christ made tangible in Communion, it is not true that

Luther reduced the Eucharistic rite to a simple ceremony of remem-
brance, as did his adversary Zwingli;19 on the contrary he admitted
the Real Presence, but neither transubstantiation—which the Greeks
also do not accept as such, although they ended up accepting the
word—nor the bloodless renewal of the historical sacrifice; none-
theless these sacramental realities as perceived by Catholics are
implied—objectively though not subjectively—in the Lutheran defi-
nition of the Eucharist, so much so that this definition could be said to
be acceptable even from the Catholic point of view, provided one is
conscious of the implication. For Catholics this implication constitutes
the very definition of the mystery, which is perhaps disproportionate
if one takes into account the somewhat dispersing and “casual” usage
Catholicism makes of its Mass;20 certain psychological facts—human
nature being what it is—would no doubt have required the mystery to
be presented in a more veiled fashion and handled with more discre-
tion. Lutheran Communion is certainly not the equivalent of Catholic
Communion, but we have reasons for believing—given its overall con-
text—that it nonetheless communicates the graces Luther expected of
it to a sufficient degree;21 this assumes that the intention of the ritual
change was fundamentally Christian and free from all ulterior motives
of a rationalist, let alone political, kind—as was in fact the case.
If Lutheran Communion is not the equivalent of Catholic Com-
munion, it is because its spiritual virtualities are not as extensive; but
this is as it should be, for these initiatic virtualities are in fact too lofty

19
Whose thesis has been retained by liberal Protestantism; Calvin attempted to restore
more or less the position of Luther. The idea of a commemorative rite pure and simple
is intrinsically heretical, since “to do in memory of” is meaningless from the standpoint
of sacramental efficacy.
20
For one must not “cast pearls before swine” nor “give what is holy unto the dogs”.
For the Orthodox the Mass is the center and has priests at its disposal, whereas it could
be said that for Catholics it is in practice the priest who is the center and who has
Masses at his disposal.
21
With perhaps certain reservations that are difficult to specify, the same could be said
for Calvinist and Anglican Communions, but not for those of the Zwinglians or liberal
Protestants, nor again—and at first sight this will seem quite paradoxical—for the
“conciliar” or “post-conciliar” masses, which are not covered by a valid archetype and
which, with their ambiguous intentions, are merely the result of human arbitrariness.

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 The Question of Protestantism

for the average man, and to impose them on him is to expose him to
sacrilege. From another point of view, if the Mass were always equal
to the historic Sacrifice of Christ, it would become a sacrilege because
of its profanation by the more or less trivial manner of its usage: hur-
ried low Masses, Masses attributed to this or that, including the most
contingent and profane occasions. No doubt the Mass coincides poten-
tially with the event of Golgotha, and this potentiality or virtuality can
always give rise to an effective coincidence;22 but if the Mass itself had
the character of its bloody prototype, at each Mass the earth would
tremble and be covered by darkness.
One of the most absurd arguments with which Zwingli, Karl-
stadt, Oekolampad, and others opposed both the Catholic Church
and Luther was the following: if the bread is really the body of Christ,
do we not eat human flesh when communing?23 To this there are
four responses. First, Christ said what he said, and one must take it
or leave it; there is nothing to change in it, unless one wishes to leave
the Christian religion. Second, Christ in fact offers neither flesh nor
blood, but bread and wine, so why the complaint? Third, the crucial
point is the question of knowing what is signified by this body that
one must eat and by this blood that one must drink; now this meaning
or content is the remission of sins, Redemption, the restitution of
man’s glorious nature, innocence at once primordial and celestial; man
eats and drinks what he must become because this is what he is in
his immortal essence; and to eat is to become united. Fourth, the fact
that bread is not flesh and that wine is not blood can be seen without
difficulty; why then ask in what manner bread is the body and wine
is the blood? This does not concern us and has no interest for us; it
is God’s concern. What alone is important for us is the transforming
and deifying power of the sacrament—its capacity to grant us salvific
impeccability, that of Christ.24

22
And this is independent of the intrinsic efficacy of the sacrament, though this ef-
ficacy is realized only in proportion to the holiness, hence receptivity, of the com-
municant.
23
This argument is supposed to allow us to conclude that the bread “signifies”—hence
“is not”— the body of Christ; the weakness of the argument is at the level of its inten-
tion.
24
In the mysteries of Eleusis, too, bread and wine were used “eucharistically” and

37

 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

_6_

The Lutheran doctrine is founded mainly on the anthropological pessi-

mism and predestinationism of Saint Augustine: man is fundamentally
a sinner, and he is totally determined by the Will of God.
What then does Saint Augustine mean by the idea that man is
irremediably a sinner—that he is powerless as long as he is left to
rely on his own strength? It means that the “fall” has the effect of
destroying the equilibrium between the inward and outward, the
vertical or ascending and the horizontal or earthly; that the exterior-
izing and worldly tendencies prevail over the interiorizing and spiritual
tendencies; and that when left to itself the horizontal tendency leads
ipso facto to the descending tendency. Now works are not enough to
rectify the situation; faith alone can accomplish this marvel, which
does not mean that faith can suffice without works—that it can be
perfectly itself in their absence.
As in Amidism, the first condition of salvation—according to
Luther—is an awareness of abysmal and invincible sin, hence of the
impossibility of vanquishing sin by our own strength. Man is practi-
cally the same thing as sin for Luther, as is the case for Christianity in
general;25 on God’s side there is Grace—which Luther identifies with
the “Justice” of a redeeming God—and between these two extremes
there is faith, where the sinner and Grace meet. In a lecture on the
Epistle to the Romans, Luther declares that Christ “made his Justice
mine, and my sin his”, and he adds: “For him who throws himself
body and soul into God’s Will it is impossible to remain outside of
God.” Likewise, in speaking about Justice he says that “faith raises the
human heart so high that it becomes one spirit with God (dass er ein
Geist mit Gott wird) and acquires the very Justice of God”.
The mysticism of Luther—tormented and yet in its own way
finally victorious—evokes all the tension between knowing and
believing or between knowledge and faith. For Luther there is nothing

communicated a divine power.

25
In a similar manner Islam views every man as a “slave”, and Asharism practically
concludes from this that every man is capable only of fear and obedience—that he is
intellectually a “villain”, or a shūdra as Hindus would say.

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 The Question of Protestantism

but faith; but he could not deny that a faith united with Grace to the
point of being “one spirit with God” is a manner of knowing God
through God or that it is the divine Knowledge in us; for all certainty
is knowledge, and there is no faith without certainty. To deny this
would be to deny the Holy Spirit and along with it our deiformity.
“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed”: this
is the very definition of faith; faith is the key—or the anticipation—of
knowledge; it is a kind of “sympathetic magic” with regard to tran-
scendent realities. But faith may also be viewed in another manner:
when the starting point is metaphysical certainty or intellection—and
this is a “naturally supernatural” mystery—faith is the life of knowl-
edge in the sense that it causes knowledge to penetrate into all our
being; for it is necessary to “love God with all our strength”, hence
with all we are.
A very important aspect of the question of faith that we have
alluded to already is the relationship between faith and works: for
Luther works contribute nothing to salvation; to believe they do
would be to doubt the Redemption—to imagine that our actions,
intrinsically sinful, could take the place of the saving work of Christ
or could add anything whatsoever to it. It is therefore faith alone that
saves, and this is acceptable if we specify—and Melanchthon did not
fail to do so—that works prolong faith and are an integral part of it,
proportionate to its sincerity; in short they prove faith. Without works
faith would not quite be faith, and without faith works would be
eschatologically inoperative.
If Luther, who despite his occasional violence was a virtuous man,
underestimated the role of works, this could also have been because
he included works in virtue and virtue in faith; virtue is in fact situ-
ated between these two poles, for it is a dimension of sincere faith and
at the same time is expressed by works; but virtue is independent of
works, and needless to say it is better to be virtuous without works
than to accomplish works without virtue. Moreover, it is fitting to
distinguish between works that are obligatory and those that are
optional, and it follows that the man of little virtue ought to insist
all the more upon meritorious actions in order to compensate for his
moral indigence and remedy this indigence gradually.
For Luther faith ennobles even insignificant actions, except for
sins of course; faith for him is a kind of sanctity, and indeed it is the
only sanctity possible. But what his mystical subjectivity seemed

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

unable to realize, at least a priori, is that this mystery of faith cannot

constitute a rule of life for the masses; in this the German reformer
was as unrealistic as the Popes, who wished to impose a kind of
monastic perfection on the clergy—or even, practically speaking, on
the whole of Christianity, though to a lesser degree.
All this brings us to the crucial question of asceticism and per-
mits us to insert some parenthetical remarks on this subject. There
is an ascesis that simply consists of sobriety, and this is sufficient for
the naturally spiritual man; there is another that consists of fighting
against the passions, and the degree of this ascesis depends upon the
demands of the individual nature; finally there is the ascesis of those
who mistakenly believe themselves to be burdened with every sin or
who identify themselves with sin through a mystical subjectivism,
without forgetting those who practice an extreme asceticism in order
to expiate the faults of others or even simply to give a good example
in a world that needs it. Of these modes of asceticism, Protestantism
retains only the first, and this is for two reasons: first because it is faith
that saves, and not works; second—and this reason coincides on the
whole with the first—because it is not for us to add our insignificant
merits to the infinite merits of Christ.
In summary: according to Luther the grace obtained by and in
faith regenerates the soul and permits it to become united with the
divine Life; it enables man to resist and combat evil and to exercise
charity toward others. Works are useful when we do not consider
them meritorious; in this case they become integrated into faith.

_6_

In the Lutheran perspective the awareness of being a sinner is every-

thing since strength of faith depends upon this awareness; according to
Luther it is better to sin and be aware of one’s misery than not to sin
and not have this awareness.
But in connection with the crucial idea of sin there is also the
fear of damnation and the scruple of not burdening oneself with yet
another sin by rashly yielding to the contrary certitude; the tensions
and complexities resulting from this attitude are altogether charac-
teristic of voluntaristic and sentimental individualism, which is not
to be found in other forms of piety; it is a fact, however, that this

40

 The Question of Protestantism

attitude determines the entire perspective with Semitic peoples. Be

that as it may, the solution to the problem is the following, and it is
furnished by esoterism, which always considers the simple nature of
things: it is true that the individualistic sentiment of being saved can
easily—though not necessarily—give rise to a quasi-narcissistic and
morally paralyzing satisfaction, which is liable to compromise the
tension toward God and above all the virtue of fear; now the healthy
attitude here—the virtue of hope, if one prefers—consists of a condi-
tional and nearly unarticulated certainty; that is, certainty of salvation
is included in an eminent and sufficient manner in the certainty of
God. One should say: thanks to the knowledge and love of God, no
fear of damnation; and not: thanks to good works, certainty of salva-
tion; for by its very nature, or rather by reason of the mechanism of
the human soul, the latter conviction risks drawing us away from God
insofar as it becomes rooted in consciousness; it draws one away from
God because it practically takes the place of God.
It follows from all of this that the terrors and despairs of Luther
were logically unnecessary, although mystically fruitful and necessary
in fact; if Scripture must contain threats of hell, it is because most men
are wild beasts, and subtle considerations regarding the relationship
between cause and effect would be ineffectual, to say the least. On the
one hand a great number of souls have been saved thanks to the image
of eternal suffering; on the other hand this image has not sufficed to
prevent innumerable crimes; if we wish to take pity on men, let us
also take pity on Scripture.
As for the scruple we mentioned above, it is appropriate to add
the following precisions: when our starting point is intellectual cer-
tainty concerning absolute Reality and its hypostatic dimensions, we
would say that this certainty has as its consequence, and also in a cer-
tain manner as its condition: first, that we abstain from everything that
takes us away from the supreme Reality in principle or in fact; and
second, that we practice what brings us closer or what leads us to it;
these two consequences are an integral part of metaphysical certainty
to the extent it is really ours. It is in certainty concerning the Sovereign
Good, and nowhere else, that we have certainty of salvation—of salva-
tion as such and not of our own salvation only—and we have it to the
very extent the second certainty is absorbed in the first.
Gnostically speaking, there are “psychics”, who can be saved or
damned; then the “pneumatics”, who by their nature cannot but be

41

 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

saved; and finally the “hylics”, who cannot but be damned. Now for
all practical purposes Luther conceived only of this third category,
though theoretically—with reservations and conditions—he also con-
ceived of the “psychics”; but in no way did he consider “pneumatics”,
hence all the tormentedness of his doctrine. In reality all three seeds are
found in every man, the “pneumatic”, the “psychic”, and the “hylic”;
it remains to be seen which predominates. In practice it is enough to
know that saying “yes” to God while abstaining from what takes one
away from Him and accomplishing what brings one closer to Him per-
tains to the “pneumatic” nature and assures salvation, every question
of “original sin” and “predestination” aside; thus in practice there is no
problem, except what we imagine and impose on ourselves.
The “pneumatic” is the man who incarnates as it were the “faith
that saves” and thus also its content, the “grace of Christ”; strictly
speaking, he cannot sin—except perhaps at the level of form—because
all he touches turns to gold, his substance being “faith” and therefore
“justification by faith”. Being “avataric” above all, this possibility is
extremely rare, and yet it exists, and cannot but exist.
Be that as it may, Luther does not seem to know what to do with
a good conscience, the one Catholics obtain through confession and
works; he confuses it with self-satisfaction and laziness, whereas it is
the normal and healthy basis for the requirements of loving God and
neighbor. But the essential here is not the fact of this confusion, but
the consequence Luther draws from it and the stimulation he obtains
from it.
The question of knowing whether we are good or bad may be
asked approximately, for we possess intelligence, but it cannot be
asked in all strictness, for God’s measures are not at our disposal; now
to say we cannot answer a question means we do not need to ask it.

_6_

On the subject of faith and works, let us insert the following paren-
thetical remarks. Just as Luther puts faith in place of moral works, so
Shinran—well before him and on the other side of the globe—puts
faith in place of spiritual means: it is not necessary to invoke Amida
in order to obtain birth in the “Pure Land”—for this would be to rely
on “self-power” to the detriment of “other-power”—but it is neces-

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 The Question of Protestantism

sary to do so out of gratitude to Amida, who has saved us a priori by

granting us faith; Shinran has but one concern, which is to avoid—or
circumvent—the idea that we save ourselves thanks to our own merit.
The notion of “gratitude” is here a euphemism intended to veil the
fact that it is impossible to deprive ourselves of a realizing initiative;
and in any case, if faith is not ours, whose is it, and if it is Amida’s,
what proof is there that it belongs to us or that we benefit from it?
One of two things: either the act of gratitude is optional, in which
case one may do without it, it being sufficient to believe instead of
invoking Amida; or else the act of gratitude is obligatory, in which case
there is no longer a question of gratitude, and the argument is merely
a ruse masking “self-power”, which determines every act and which
we, as free and responsible creatures, cannot escape.
Neither Luther nor Shinran can change the nature of man, which
in fact entails a certain liberty and thus a possibility of “self-power”,
hence of merit; but like the Japanese mystic, the German Reformer
is in love with the experience of faith and with the Scripture that
nourishes it, and perish all the rest. There is also in Luther a share of
Asharism: like the Arab theologian, Luther sacrifices intelligence to
faith and freedom to the Foreknowledge and Omnipotence of God.
And if an Ashari and a Shinran are “orthodox” in their fashion, as their
respective traditions acknowledge, we do not see why we cannot grant
Luther the same extenuating circumstances or the same approving
evaluations, mutatis mutandis.
Like Shinran, Luther believes that in putting faith in place of
works he brings a certain consolation and liberation, but this is solely
a question of spiritual temperament. It is much more reassuring for
some men to base themselves upon works, which are something
objective, concrete, tangible, and definable, whereas one can always
torment oneself with the question of whether one really has faith or
whether one has understood what faith is.
Be that as it may, in the thought of Luther as in that of Shinran—
and this follows from certain of our preceding demonstrations—there
are compensatory arguments that re-establish equilibrium in such a
way that our objection has a merely relative import, except for minds
that abuse the formulations in question. One thing is certain, and it
is the essential element here: faith sometimes saves in the absence of
outward works, but works never save without faith.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

Man cannot escape the duty of having to do good; it is in fact

impossible under normal conditions not to do good; but what matters
is that he knows it is God who acts. A meritorious work belongs to
God, though we participate in it; our works are good—or better—to
the extent we are penetrated by this awareness.

_6_

As for predestination, which is so important in Augustinian and then

in Lutheran thought, it is fundamentally none other than ontological
necessity insofar as it refers to a determined possibility. Now God may
displace or change the mode of a possibility, but He cannot make a
possibility become impossible.
Predestination as such is situated in Relativity—in Māyā, if one
prefers—since it concerns the relative or contingent; but its root in
the Absolute is reducible to Necessity. Absolute Being comprises both
Necessity and Freedom, and the same therefore holds true for relative
or contingent Being, the world; thus it is false to deny the possibility
of freedom in the world, just as it is false to deny predestination. A
work freely accomplished by man always contains predestination as a
different dimension; but with a change of emphasis it could also be
said that a freely done work is located within predestination as in an
invisible mold pertaining precisely to another dimension; the differ-
ence is like that between space and time inasmuch as time is totally
different from the three spatial dimensions and yet is always present.
Space then corresponds to necessity in the sense that the things within
it are what they are and are found where they are found, whereas time
corresponds to freedom in the sense that things can change or move;
all this is a purely symbolic, hence indirect and partial, analogy, for in
reality necessity and freedom are found everywhere.
Be that as it may, it follows from all we have said that it is an error
to reduce works to predestination, thereby denying their freedom, and
that it is no less an error to deny all predestination in works, thereby
lending them an absolute freedom belonging only to God. For the
principle is this: freedom as such is always freedom, and necessity
as such is always necessity, but whereas Necessity and Freedom are
absolute in God, they are relative in the world, for there is no mani-
fested necessity that does not include an element of freedom because

44

 The Question of Protestantism

of contingency any more than there is a manifested freedom that

does not include an element of necessity because of predestination.
To reduce our actions to predestination is to attribute absoluteness to
them; to believe they are free in relation to the Absolute is to attribute
its Liberty to them. Ontologically our actions are predestined, and we
must know this in order not to believe we are as sovereign as God or
could be situated outside His Will; but practically our actions are free,
hence meritorious, and we must know this in order to be able to act
and merit.

_6_

In theology there is an opposition, however, not only between predes-

tination and freedom but between faith and knowledge; just as some
believe freedom must be denied in the name of predestination, or
conversely, so others believe knowledge must be rejected in the name
of faith, or on the contrary—as is the case with rationalists—that faith
must be rejected in the name of what they believe to be knowledge.
In reality there is no incompatibility here, any more than there is
between freedom and predestination; for if these latter two principles
are complementary dimensions of one and the same possibility of
manifestation, the same holds true for knowledge and faith in the
sense that there is no faith without knowledge and no knowledge
without faith. Nonetheless knowledge takes precedence: faith is an
indirect and volitive mode of knowledge, whereas knowledge suffices
unto itself and is not a mode of faith; on the other hand, when knowl-
edge is situated within Relativity it requires an element of faith to the
extent it is a priori intellectual and not existential, mental and not
cardiac, partial and not total; otherwise all metaphysical understanding
would imply sanctity ipso facto. Be that as it may, all transcendent
certainty has something divine about it, though as certainty only and
not necessarily as the acquisition of a particular man.
In other words, in a Semitic climate much is made of the incom-
patibility between knowledge and faith and of the pre-eminence of
the second—to the point of holding the first in contempt and forget-
ting that within Relativity the one goes hand in hand with the other.
Knowledge is the adequate perception of the real, and faith is the
conformity of will and sentiment to a truth imperfectly perceived by

45

 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

the intelligence; if the perception were perfect it would be impossible

for the believer to lose his faith.
Even when theoretical knowledge is perfect and hence unshak-
able, however, it always requires a volitive element, which contributes
to the process of assimilation or integration, for we must “become
what we are”; and this operative element or element of intensity stems
from faith. Conversely, in religious faith there is always an element of
knowledge that determines it, for in order to believe it is necessary to
know what one must believe; moreover, in plenary faith there is an
element of certainty, which is not volitive and the presence of which
we cannot prevent, regardless of our efforts to reject all knowledge in
order to benefit from the “obscure merit of faith”.
In God alone is knowledge excused from an element of realiza-
tional intensity or totalizing will; as for faith, its prototype in divinis is
Life or Love; and in God alone are Life and Love independent of every
motive justifying or determining them ab extra. It is by participation
in this mystery that Saint Bernard could say, “I love because I love”,
which is like a paraphrase of the Saying of the Burning Bush, “I am
that I am”: “That which is”.
It is knowledge, or the element truth, that gives faith all its value;
otherwise we could believe no matter what as long as we believed; it is
only as a function of truth that the intensity of our faith has meaning.
And quite paradoxically it is predestination that makes us freely
choose truth and goodness; without freedom there is no choice. In the
final analysis Predestination is all we are.
But divine Freedom requires a predestination that is paradoxically
relative and relates to modes and degrees together with the Predesti-
nation that is absolute. Likewise divine Necessity requires a relative
freedom together with the Freedom that as such is absolute; this
relative freedom is ours, and while it cannot be anything other than
freedom it nonetheless falls within the framework of a necessity that
surpasses it.

_6_

Just as the early Churches conceive a hierarchy that places monks

and priests above the laity and the worldly, so also Luther—who had
nothing of the revolutionary or even of the democrat in him—con-

46

 The Question of Protestantism

ceives a hierarchy that places those who truly live by faith above those
who have not yet reached this point or are simply incapable of it. He
intended to appeal to those who “willingly do what they know and
are capable of acting with firm faith in the beneficence and favor of
God” and “whom others ought to emulate”; but not to those who
“make ill use of this freedom and rashly trust in it, so that they must
be driven with laws, teachings, and warnings”, and other formulations
of this kind. What this means is that there was a kind of esoterism in
his intention at least in practice: “Faith does not suffice,” he declares,
“except the faith that takes shelter under the wings of Christ”; now
Christ is love.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels . . . though
I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love
(caritas, agapē), I am nothing. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, love,
these three; but the greatest of these is love.” This crucial passage of
the First Epistle to the Corinthians seems to contradict all the Apostle
taught concerning justification by faith in his Epistle to the Romans;
how to explain this paradox? The answer on the one hand is that love
is the greatest thing since “God is Love” and the noblest of the Com-
mandments is the love of God and neighbor; but on the other hand
faith has primacy since it is the key to everything and it is faith that
saves. The mystic of Wittenberg would even say that in practice—not
in principle—faith is greater because love, being too great, is impracti-
cable and cannot be attained except by and in Christ and through faith;
that love is too great follows precisely from the passage in the Epistle
to the Corinthians, in which the Apostle believes he must call upon
the intercession of the “tongues of angels”, the “gift of prophecy”, the
understanding of “all mysteries, and all knowledge”, and the faith that
“removes mountains”. Basing himself on the doctrine of the Epistle to
the Romans, Luther not unreasonably deduces that love is realizable
only indirectly or virtually by and in faith, except for the level that is
accessible to us naturally, namely, charity toward our neighbor. In a
word, to affirm that love is the greatest thing is not the same as saying
it is the most immediately essential; it is often necessary to interpret a
particular passage of Scripture in light of another given passage, which,
though seeming to contradict it, in reality defines it and renders it
concrete.
Furthermore, there is an element of Semitic stylization in this
famous verse to the Corinthians in the sense that exaggeration, taken

47

 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

to the point of absurdity, serves to underscore the grandeur of the

thing spoken of; it is what one might call a “henotheistic” logic, that is,
a logic that lends an absolute character to the thing whose excellence
one wishes to demonstrate to the detriment of another thing, which
is nonetheless presented in a quasi-absolute light at another moment.
Taken literally, however, it is clearly absurd to maintain that someone
whose faith can move mountains, et cetera, is nothing if he does not
have love, for a faith of such strength could lack nothing, or else it
would not be so strong; Luther rightly noticed this in his own way.26
We could also say that the Apostle has slipped from one perspec-
tive to another, namely, from that of faith to that of love, or rather
that both points of view forced themselves upon his mind successively,
independently of each other. Now a choice must be made: Catholi-
cism and Orthodoxy—which were united for more than a thousand
years—accorded the pre-eminence to love, whereas Protestantism
wished to emphasize faith; love with faith in the first case, faith with
love in the second. In all justice both accentuations should have always
co-existed, and indeed they often did before the Reformation; but
in fact the Abrahamic and moreover somewhat “Quietistic” idea of
the faith that saves had lain dormant during that period of mystical
heroism and superstitious abuse we call the Middle Ages.
The proof of the primacy of love is that the supreme Command-
ment is the love of God and neighbor; and the proof of the primacy
of faith is that the creed is in practice more essential than charity
since it is better to believe in God without charity than to exercise
charity without believing in God. Catholicism starts with the idea of
the primacy of love and with the fact of our freedom, and it demands
ascetic zeal; Protestantism for its part starts with the primacy of faith
and with the fact of our powerlessness, and it demands steadfastness
in trust.
We might mention an analogy here that brings us back to
our considerations of religious archetypes: Vishnuism distinguishes

26
Nonetheless, not all his arguments are conclusive. Let us note at this point that in
all interdenominational controversies one meets with purely “functional” arguments,
which are inadequate in themselves; for example, the Epistle to the Romans attributes
all vices to the pagans, whereas they cannot be attributed to the best of the Stoics or
Neoplatonists. Some arguments are meant to clear the ground and not to serve the
truth as such; these are necessarily two-edged.

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 The Question of Protestantism

between bhakti, love properly so called and heroic when necessary,

and prapatti, confident abandonment to divine Mercy; these are the
two ways it offers the faithful. Now the way of love corresponds
analogically to the priestly and monastic perspective of early and
Patristic Christianity, whereas the way of trust or faith is found in
Protestantism; analogy is not identity, but in the final analysis the fun-
damental attitudes and celestial archetypes from which they derive are
the same on both sides.
Love is on the one hand our tendency toward God—the tendency
of the accident toward the Substance—and on the other hand our
consciousness of “myself” in the “other” and of the “other” in “me”;
it is also the sense of beauty, above us and around us as well as in
our own soul. Faith is saying “yes” to the truth of God and immor-
tality—the truth we carry in the depths of our heart—and seeing
concretely what appears as abstract; to speak in Islamic terms, it is
“serving God as if thou sawest Him, and if thou seest Him not, He
nonetheless seeth thee”; and it is also the sense of the goodness of God
and trust in Mercy. He who has faith has goodness, and he who has
love has beauty; but at the same time each of these poles contains the
other. We are the accidents, and the Substance is Beauty, Goodness,
and Beatitude.
Love and faith: the one like the other is a door to knowledge;
and knowledge in turn gives rise to both faith and love. Love opens
to gnosis because it tends toward union; faith opens to it because it is
founded on truth; to love is to want to be united, and to believe is to
acknowledge what is true and to become what one acknowledges.

_6_

In plucking the ears of corn, the Apostles violated the Sabbath; it is

the inward Sabbath that counts and that takes priority over the out-
ward. Saint Paul suppressed “circumcision in the flesh” in the name of
“circumcision in the spirit”; Meister Eckhart teaches that if we knew
God is everywhere we would receive Communion even when eating
ordinary bread. All this becomes clear in the light of this principle:
outward means are necessary only because—or to the extent that—
we have lost access to their inward archetypes; a sacrament is the
exteriorization of an immanent source of grace—the “living water” of

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Christ—just as Revelation is an outward and macrocosmic manifesta-

tion of Intellection. Luther was certainly unaware of this principle
or mystery; nonetheless his exclusive recourse to faith, his tendency
to interiorize everything for the sake of the “spirit” and against the
“flesh”, hence also his reduction of the sacraments with regard to their
form and number, all refer logically and mystically to the principle of
inwardness or immanence we have just spoken of.27
The Koran gives more than one example of the principle of
abrogation (naskh): certain verses annul other verses, and in most
cases the meaning of one—whether the “nullifying” (nāsikh) or the
“annulled” (mansūkh)—is more universal than that of the other. The
profound significance of this phenomenon is that every form can be
abrogated by a more essential form, and with all the more reason by
their common essence; a form is never a pure absolute, although it
may be “relatively absolute”, as is the case precisely with sacred forms.
In a Hindu and Buddhist climate this transition from the formal to
the essential—whether gradual or abrupt—is an acknowledged pos-
sibility, whereas in the Semitic West it is excluded; the notion of
heresy does not allow for relativizing, or even justifying, reservations;
this is the spirit of alternativism, which in many cases is justified—in
the East as well as in the West—but not in all cases. As for the prin-
ciple of abrogation, we had to mention it in the context of Lutheran
audacities in order to demonstrate at least indirectly that if a spiritual
perspective is indeed possible it may well draw conclusions exceeding
what one would normally expect or undermining the usual bases of a
given traditional criteriology.
If Luther rejects all that Catholicism understands by “tradition”,
it is because of an association of ideas connected with the “command-
ments of men” mentioned in the Gospel, as we pointed out earlier;

27
If this perspective, which could not but appear at a given moment of the Chris-
tian cycle, were intrinsically false and ineffectual, one could not explain how an es-
oterist such as Jakob Boehme could flower in such a climate, not to mention other
Rosicrucian and Hermetic Lutheran theosophists. Moreover, it is known that Luther’s
coat-of-arms features a rose with a heart and cross in the center, which perhaps is more
than chance. Let us also mention in this context such Anglican esoterists as John Smith
the Platonist and William Law, the mystical theologian, without forgetting the isolated
mystic of the first half of the twentieth century who was the anonymous author (Lilian
Staveley) of The Golden Fountain, The Prodigal Returns, and The Romance of the Soul.

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 The Question of Protestantism

he allows only “Scripture” to remain, and it becomes everything;

bibliolatry is the pivot of his religion, as is also the case in Judaism
and Islam.

_6_

Scholastic theology teaches that man can—and therefore must—

obtain grace not only through a supernatural gift of God but also by
natural means, such as virtues and works. Luther was well aware that
we cannot produce the grace of God—and in fact no one has ever
said the contrary—but he seems to have been unaware that we can
remove the obstacles separating us from grace, just as it is enough to
open a shutter in order to let in sunlight; one does not attract light by
magic any more than one creates it, but one removes what renders it
invisible.
The mystic of Wittenberg is “more Catholic than the Pope” in
feeling that it is pretension on the part of man to believe in the quasi-
theurgical virtue of certain actions—to believe a good act can ipso
facto precipitate a concordant grace, as if man had the power to deter-
mine the divine Will; and this feeling furnishes Luther with a reason,
perhaps the main one, for rejecting the Mass. In fact to believe we can
determine the divine Will by our comportment—Deo juvante—is in
no way pretentious, given that God created us for precisely this; it is a
normal or “supernaturally natural” consequence of our theomorphism;
thus there is no harm in the idea that our actions can be meritorious
before God, and no one obliges us to become proud of them. A good
conscience is a normal phenomenon; it is the normal climate within
which a man runs toward God; there is nothing in a good conscience
that attracts us to the world, it being perfectly neutral in this respect,
unless we are hypocrites. On the contrary, it draws us toward Heaven
since by its very nature it is a taste of Heaven.
What constitutes the Lutheran message fundamentally is an
emphasis on faith within an awareness of our misery, or by this very
awareness, though also in spite of it. All the limitations of this point
of departure have indirectly the function of a key or symbol and are
compensated for, beyond words, by the ineffable response of Mercy;
in the final analysis the initial torment is resolved in a quasi-mystical
experience of the faith that appeases, vivifies, liberates.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

_6_

The idea that no work can be “justice” before God because all human
work is tainted with sin—first with concupiscence and then with
pride as a result of the sin of Adam and Eve—has its logical basis in the
limitation of the human “I” in the face of the divine “Self” and in the
impossibility for the “I” to liberate itself without the decisive concur-
rence of the “Self”. Analogy is certainly not identity, and theology is
not metaphysics in spite of points where they meet; but where there
is analogy there can always be identity by way of exception and to
some degree, as the spark can always flash forth from the flint. The
Christian denominations as such can never be of the same order as
gnosis, any more than can any other exoterism; and yet a Meister Eck-
hart and a Jacob Boehme manifest this perspective in their own way,
the first within the framework of Catholicism and the second within
that of Protestantism.28 Both saw the “immanent transcendence” of
the pure Intellect, Eckhart in recognizing the increatum et increabile
character of the kernel of human intelligence and Boehme in referring
to “inward illuminations” (innere Erleuchtungen) of a sapiential, hence
intellective, nature. Similarly each was able to account for Māyā, the
principle of universal Relativity, Eckhart in establishing the distinc-
tion between hypostatic differentiation and the “ineffable Depth”
(der Ungrund) and Boehme in posing the principle of opposition or
contrasts, rooted in God and operating in the world in order to make
God knowable in an objective and distinctive mode.29

28
It is true that certain convictions of Boehme stray from Lutheran—or post-Lu-
theran—orthodoxy, but even so he did not become a Catholic; he lived and died
in the Protestant Church, and his death was that of a saint. We could also mention
Paracelsus—by whom Boehme was moreover inspired—who was at once Rosicrucian
theosophist, mystic, and physician and to whom is owed a “spagyric medicine”, that
is, one akin to Hermeticism and based upon the solve et coagula of the alchemists. It
would be inexplicable for so eminent a mind to have chosen Protestantism if it were
intrinsically heretical. As for Boehme, let us note in passing that his anthropology, like
that of certain Fathers of the Church, was not immune to an anti-sexual and moral-
izing angelism, which sees the original fall in the form of the body and not in matter
alone, whereas Hindu doctrine, for example, takes seriously the sexual aspect of hu-
man theomorphism.
29
In theology the pure Intellect is prefigured by the objectifying notion of the Holy

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 The Question of Protestantism

One finds certain tendencies in Luther that are very similar to

those of the “friends of God” (die Gottesfreunde), a mystical society
that flourished in the fourteenth century in the Rhineland, Swabia,
and Switzerland, whose most eminent representatives were Tauler
and the blessed Suso. The former—known to Luther—made himself
the spokesman of the Eckhartian doctrine of “quietude” (Gelassen-
heit) and fought against “justice through works” (Werkgerechtigkeit)
and against outward religiosity.
According to Tersteegen30—one of the saintly men of the Prot-
estant Church—“The true theosophers, of whom we know very few
after the time of the Apostles, were all mystics, but it is very far from
the case that all mystics are theosophers, not one among thousands.
The theosophers are those whose spirit [not reason] has explored the
depths of the Divinity under divine guidance and has known such
marvels thanks to an infallible vision.”31
What exoterism does not and cannot say—neither Catholic nor
Orthodox any more than Protestant—is that the Pauline or Biblical
mystery of faith is none other at its root than the mystery of gnosis,
which is to say that gnosis is the prototype and underlying essence of
faith. If faith can save, it is because intellective knowledge delivers—a
knowledge that is immanent while being transcendent, and conversely.
The Lutheran theosophers were gnostics within the framework of
faith, and the most metaphysical Sufis emphasized faith on the basis
of knowledge; no doubt there is a faith without gnosis, but there is
no gnosis without faith. The soul can go to God without direct assis-
tance from the pure Intellect, but the Intellect cannot manifest itself

Spirit and Māyā by the temporalizing notion of predestination; the Holy Spirit en-
lightens, strengthens, and kindles, and predestination makes creatures and things to be
what they are, and what they cannot not be.
30
In an epistle entitled Kurzer Bericht von der Mystik.
31
The theosopher Angelus Silesius would not perhaps have left the Lutheran Church
had he not been expelled for his esoterism; in any case Bernardine mysticism seemed
to correspond best to his spiritual vocation. This makes us think somewhat of Sri
Chaitanya, who as an Advaitin threw out all his books one fine day so as to think only
of Krishna; and let us note at this point that this bhakta, while accepted as orthodox,
rejected the ritual of the Brahmans and the castes in order to put the entire accent on
faith and love, not on works.

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 Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

without giving the soul peace and life and without requiring from it
all the faith of which it is capable.

“The Question of Protestantism”

Features in
Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism

A New Translation with Selected Letters

© 2008 World Wisdom, Inc.

by Frithjof Schuon

Edited by James S.Cutsinger

All Rights Reserved. For Personal Usage Only

www.worldwisdom.com

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